


Strike Three

by tiamatv



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Baseball, Best Friends, M/M, bullying mentioned-not explicit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-18
Updated: 2020-04-18
Packaged: 2021-03-02 03:41:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,448
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23678566
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tiamatv/pseuds/tiamatv
Summary: Sometimes, it can be hard to figure out what winning's supposed to mean.
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester
Comments: 19
Kudos: 97





	Strike Three

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to sharky boi and Quinn Quentin for betaing, and to the lovely folk at the Profound Bond server--without your encouragement I would not have gotten the gumption to post anything on AO3, probably ever...

Cas never let people know when something hurt him.

Dean got that. Hell, he goddamned _got that._ He’d been the new kid in so many schools before… well, before. He knew what it was like to fake it. He even knew what it was like to make it, sometimes.

Like now. Like now, with his heartbeat thudding in his mouth, his shoulder aching with that perfect, perfect pulling ache of a line of tension all down his back, _strike one,_ and _strike two,_ and _strike three_ , and nothing had ever felt this awesome.

Except.

Cas just dropped his batting helmet down onto home plate, letting it roll off his long fingers, and his black hair was such a mess. He tipped his head up, blue eyes quiet as he looked up across the sky, following the thin scudding line of some clouds, and… that was it. He didn’t look at Dean. He didn’t look at his teammates, who even Dean could see were shooting glares at the back of his head in between gathering up their crap. He didn’t look at Dean’s teammates, running, halfway between a pile and a scramble in the middle of the field, their jerseys mussed with sweat and clay and each others’ hands. He didn’t let go of the bat in his hand.

He just… didn’t. He didn’t.

*_*_*_*

There were days where Dean knew he was pitching well, and days when he knew he was on fire, and there were days where he felt like he was a howler monkey and he was just throwing shit around for all that it went where he wanted it to. He huffed and slapped the ball accusingly into his glove, half expecting it, with the day he’d been having, to roll out. Then made a louder noise of disgust and looked expectantly over at the guy sprawled on his belly over the neatly mowed back lawn of his house.

(Cas’s family was so weird. Dean wasn’t even sure why they bothered to mow the back lawn, it was fenced in, it wasn’t like anyone was ever gonna _see_ it. So what if a couple of weeds or a dandelion or something cropped up now and again?)

“Are you expecting sympathy?” Cas didn’t look up from his book as he went for his lemonade. Of course, seeing as how it was Cas, he couldn’t look away from what he was reading for long enough to look at his drink, either, as he brought it up. So he just kind of mouthed awkwardly at the air and stuck out the tip of his tongue for awhile until the straw caught on his bottom lip and he sucked it in, and maybe Dean tried a little too hard not to watch because sort of perving on your best friend was _gross_.

(Cas, right, was just as weird as the fact that his family mowed the back lawn.)

“No,” Dean groused, ‘cause, well, yeah, of _course_ he’d expected sympathy. So there was something kind of wrong about the fact that he’d known he wasn’t gonna get it from Cas, and he’d tried _anyway,_ and not getting it was making a grin pull up at the corners of his lips. “C’mon, catch for me, it ain’t the same throwing at a target.”

“No. I’m studying, Dean.” Cas pointedly took his highlighter up and left a streak of bright pink across his textbook.

Dean huffed, and stripped off his glove, wrinkling his nose at how stiff it still was. Yeah, it was great having a new glove, but why was breaking them in such a pain in the ass? Shaving cream and rubber bands and mattress _again?_ He’d already done that a week! “They even play baseball at that fancy private school of yours, or is it just fencing and, and curling or some crap like that?“

“There’s nothing wrong with fencing, Dean,” Cas still didn’t look up as Dean dropped heavily down to the grass beside him. “But, seeing as how we live in Kansas, I don’t know where you think we’d be practicing curling.”

Sometimes Dean just didn’t know whether to sigh or growl at his best friend. Seeing as how both of them would have pretty much the same effect—none at all—he grabbed his own lemonade instead from where it was sweating on its tray and coaster—because, yeah, Cas’s family was the kind that brought lemonade out on trays, with coasters. “Why’re you even out here?”

“Because you are,” Cas pointed out, finally glancing up, and the jolt of pleasure that Dean got at that shouldn’t have even been legal, “and it’s beautiful outside, and oh, this is _my house_. Yes, of course we play baseball. I’m on the team. By the way, you’re going to tear your labrum at some point if you keep throwing like that.”

There was so much to unpack in that statement that Dean just gaped at him for a long moment. “What?” When Cas opened his mouth again, Dean flapped his glove at him. “No, yeah, I heard you, but… wait, did you just call me a girl?” he scowled. “That insult doesn’t even make sense, dude.”

This made Cas actually look up and squint at him. “What? I didn’t— _what?_ ”

Dean blinked back at him. “You know. Uh. Labrum… isn’t that… uh…” the look on Cas’s face was so fucking unimpressed right now that, yeah, _nope_. “No?”

“That’s…” Cas’s face made a complicated serious of little twitches before he pushed his book away, folded his arm against the grass, and plastered his face against it. “Why are you my friend?” he muttered into his own skin.

“’Cause you’re awesome, and so am I, so it works,” Dean replied, promptly. And yes, he was going to ignore the fact that it wasn’t practicing his pitching that had him red-faced right now. “Okay, so what are you _saying_?”

The noise that Cas made into the crook of his elbow was animal, halfway between a scoff, a cackle, and a groan of pain. “You’re thinking of ‘labia.’ The labrum is the cartilage that holds the ball of your shoulder into the socket, Dean.” Him having his face in his arm didn’t do anything to muffle the deep rumble that his voice had broken into a few months ago.

“Oh.”

Cas’s shoulders shuddered once, then again.

“Are you _laughing_ at me?!” Dean threw his glove, and he’d meant to hit Cas on the back of his messy head but because it was just that sort of fucking day, it hit him right between the shoulder blades. Cas’s entire body jerked a little, but when he rolled onto his back, throwing off the glove, his face was almost as red as Dean’s, his eyes were squinted most of the way shut, and the effort of trying not to laugh almost looked like _pain_. “You are such a smug asshole _,_ anyone could’ve made that mistake!”

The laugh punched its way out of Cas like a perfect fastball. “No, Dean,” he gasped, “No, I’m reasonably sure that’s not true.”

“Fuck you!” Dean sputtered, before he reached out and jabbed his best friend in the side. Cas just grunted because the bastard wasn’t even _ticklish,_ but at least he stopped making those little hiccoughing sounds that meant he hadn’t quite stopped laughing on the inside. “Wait, what do you mean you’re on the baseball team, how’s that even possible?”

“The normal way, I imagine.” Cas raised an eyebrow at him, amusement still flirting all over his face as he sprawled back onto the grass, both arms over his head, the hem of his shirt riding up until a shining sliver of skin appeared between his uniform undershirt and the edge of his black slacks. The nerd hadn’t even changed into something more comfortable when he’d gotten home from school. “Tryouts? I’ve been playing baseball for years.”

“You’ve—” Dean threw both of his hands up in the air, and yeah, it was one of those days he wasn’t gonna get Cas to be any less of a cryptic asshole than he normally was. “You won’t watch Cubs games with me!”

“What does that have to do with anything?” Cas asked, quick-switching to irritable the way he always got when the world didn’t make sense to him in the way he thought it should. Which was kinda often, Dean wasn’t gonna lie. “I find watching baseball very dull.”

“Oh God. You’re so weird,” Dean sighed, folding down over his knees to rest his forehead in the palm of his hand. “Hey, you any good?”

“Oh, yes. Very,” Cas told him, in that strangely amazing confidence that in anyone else would have been arrogance, but in Castiel Novak was just… _certainty._

“You knew I played,” which was a fucking understatement—since moving here in August, Dean’s life had been Sammy, baseball and Cas, in pretty much precisely that order, with some school thrown in there somewhere. “Why didn’t you tell me? We coulda thrown together or something.”

Well, sure as shit Dean couldn’t imagine Cas’s dad tossing a ball around with the kids. Not that _Dean’s_ dad had ever really thrown a ball around with them much, but that was because John was working, always working. Yeah, maybe he drank too much, and yeah, maybe Dean ended up taking care of Sammy more often than he didn’t, but Dean hadn’t ever doubted that his Dad loved them. Cas’s dad, though? Not so much. And Dean didn’t think he’d ever seen, much less met, Cas’s mom in the six months since he and Cas had met, but if there’d been anyone that Cas’s brothers had gotten the scary-as-crap genes from it probably wasn’t from Zachariah Novak.

“I didn’t see how it would matter,” Cas told him, but he didn’t look him in the eyes as he said it.

(It took him another six months to realize why: because Cas didn’t talk about the things that actually mattered to him.)

“Well. ‘Kay. You wanna?”

“Wanna—I mean, _want to_ ,” and Dean grinned at this evidence that Castiel Novak was not beyond corruption after all, “what?”

“Throw together?” Dean rolled both of his shoulders, exaggeratedly. “You gotta keep me from tearing my labia, after all.”

So okay, maybe he deserved it when Cas threw his glove back at his face.

*_*_*_*

Ninth inning, six and seven, a runner on first and another on third. Blue eyes smirked at him across home plate, under the flat bill of his batting helmet—that little smile that no-one else ever recognized, and Dean grinned back, tucked himself into the pitcher’s mound, taut and bright. God, this was good, this was so good. This was it, they were fucking seniors now, they were going to State, they were on top of the fucking _world_ , and everything was possible.

It was only when the last pitch rolled off his palm, danced off the tips of his fingers, and he watched it arc and drop, that Dean realized that of course that couldn’t possibly be true.

*_*_*_*

“I realize it’s silly,” Cas sighed, tossing the ball up, a neat flick off the tips of his fingers, and catching it in his palm with a soft slap. They hadn’t turned the lights back on, and Dean really thought that Cas was gonna hit himself in the face and knock some of those perfect teeth out if he kept tossing a ball lying in bed in the dark that way, but thus far he really hadn’t. The control he had was just _surreal_ sometimes.

“No, man, it really isn’t,” Dean shrugged, once, and turned onto his side on the other twin bed. “You’re gonna say that to me of all people? I love to play.”

“I know you do,” and they shared a smile at that, Cas’s barely visible since he wasn’t showing his teeth, but Dean knew it was there. He twisted and in the soft shadows of his room, Dean heard the clunk of Cas dropping the ball back into the bowl he kept it in by his bedside.

“Look, just ‘cause you don’t need baseball for scholarships and shit the way I do doesn’t mean you can’t _want_ your team to go to State,” Dean insisted, when Cas didn’t say anything else. “You can want that for _you,_ y’know? I know how hard you train.”

“You complain about how hard I train.”

“I complain about how hard you train with _me_ , ‘cause I swear to God you’re twice as hard on me as my _coach_ ,” Dean muttered.

“That’s because you’re lazy,” Cas announced to the ceiling, and he _totally deserved_ the pillow Dean threw at him. Which also kind of backfired because Cas kept it, hugging it to his chest, a puffy mound over in the twin bed on the other side of his big library of a room. It was all books and bookshelves, no posters, no jerseys, nothing to show that a baseball nut lived in it, just a nerdy little guy who was gonna be a doctor someday if his parents had anything to say about it. “I suppose… I don’t know. Baseball is… I would like to succeed at it. To be more than…” and he trailed off. “Baseball is something that is mine.”

“Ours,” Dean muttered.

This time, Cas’s teeth flashed. “Ours,” he agreed.

*_*_*_*

His cleats caught on the clay of the infield as he stepped closer. It occurred to Dean about three steps in that he might be the last person in the world Cas wanted to see right this second.

He kept walking anyway, and didn’t stop.

Cas’s blue, blue eyes dropped from the sky, settled on Dean’s face, slowly. “Hello, Dean,” he said, softly, in his deep rasp of a voice. He didn’t smile, didn’t try to.

And maybe he was about to tell him ‘good job,’ maybe he was about to say ‘go join your teammates,’ or maybe he was about to still fucking give Dean constructive criticism because Dean hadn’t been the one who’d done this alone. He _couldn’t_ have done it alone, not without Cas’s hands sharpening his posture and standing there for hours taking notes as Dean threw and threw and threw, and his long graceful fingers careful on Dean’s shoulder when he’d overdone it and every muscle in his rotator cuff just _burned_.

But he was still the weird, nerdy kid down the block, the one who lived in the really big corner house, the one Dean had never really cared to get to meet because no-one who lived in a house like that was gonna bother with him—up until the one day in late September he’d stepped in, stepped up. Stepped in front of Dean where he lay sprawled on the sidewalk with a chipped tooth and bleeding lip, and just _stared_ down Alistair McLean. Just… looked at him, without a word—forced him back just from the intensity of his blue eyes like Alistair wasn’t four inches taller than he was and mean like fire ants.

When the kid raised his chin and took one step forward, Alistair just… went. He hadn’t run, but he sure looked like he wanted to.

The guy had turned and kneeled by Dean’s side, where the world was still kind of swimmy in front of his gaze and all he could see was a frame of blue and a little frown. “My older brothers,” he’d told Dean, matter-of-fact and like they were just continuing a conversation that Dean was pretty sure that they had never had, “are quite intimidating.”

Yeah, it turned out that they were, all three of them were scary-ass sons of bitches, but from the perspective of two years Dean was pretty sure that that was not what had gotten Alistair walking to the other side of the street and down the block at double-time.

“I’m Castiel.”

“Weird name,” Dean had slurred. He didn’t think he’d ever thought another guy was beautiful before. So, yeah, that was weird, too. But he didn’t say that aloud. He didn’t think so, anyway.

The corner of Cas’s mouth crooked. It took months before Dean realized that was a smile. “Yes,” he told him, “and while we’re testing out the obvious, your mouth is bleeding and I think you have a concussion.”

Yeah, so Dean had been in fucking love with him since before he’d realized what falling in love _was_ , and Cas never, ever let anyone see when he was hurting.

Which, right now—right now, that was okay. Dean could hurt enough for both of them.

Dean knew that his dad was up there in the stands, that he’d taken the morning off from the garage to be there—for the first time in Dean’s life he’d made it to a baseball game because today, today _mattered._ He almost thought he could hear Sammy screaming at the top of his little lungs from even where they were standing. He could hurt enough for the fact that he was pretty fucking sure that for all that Cas had both parents and three brothers and a sister not a single one of them was up there to watch him win, or hug him if he didn’t. They'd dropped him off and told him to call when the game was done.

He’d learned not to show hurt for a reason, after all.

He smelled of clay and sunshine and sweat and expensive leather conditioner when Dean wrapped his arms around him, Cas’s back jerking stiff—Dean didn’t remember when he’d gotten taller than Cas, but sometime in the last year or so he had, and it was kind of weird, but not _wrong_. Not wrong at all. They were so close, they were both _disgusting_ , and Dean had just taken away something that he knew Cas had wanted, one of the few things Cas even _bothered_ to want, and it didn’t matter that he’d wanted it just as much—

Cas’s arms came back up, slowly, like he thought Dean was gonna say ‘kidding!’ or like he thought he was gonna shove, and when he wrapped them around Dean it was as careful as someone who didn’t know how strong he was. Dean tucked his arms closer, rubbed a strong shoulder blade, the fine iron line of muscle down Cas’s spine through his jersey, his calluses scraping across the fabric.

“Well done,” Cas whispered against his cheek, his voice just barely the rasp of gravel, and that— then his shoulders shook, shuddered, just once.

That was it. That was fucking _it_.

The blood roared in Dean’s ears louder than his teammates, louder than the stands, louder than the knowledge that his school, his _team_ , was going to State and he was gonna have to do it without Cas.

Cas’s blue gaze was still steady when Dean drew back. It was still steady when he dipped his chin and nodded over Dean’s shoulder, murmured “They’re waiting for you.”

It wasn’t even a little bit steady when Dean cupped both hands around his face with the thumb of his pitching hand resting on that tiny little crease Cas had on his chin, leaned back in and kissed him, full on those soft, chapped pink lips he’d had more than a few—okay, okay, more than a _many_ —dirty thoughts about.

He heard the clunk of the bat in Cas’s hand hitting the dirt.

It wasn’t what he’d thought, or fantasized, or dreamed. Cas didn’t kiss back for a second, eyes wider and bluer than an ocean drenched in sunshine. It was hot on the diamond, they were both sweaty, Dean had been pitching for awhile and he probably stank, Dean didn’t know what the _Hell_ his coach or his teammates or, fuck, his _dad_ , was gonna make of this, and—

And then Cas’s eyelashes fluttered, his lips moved in a careful little sweeping catch of skin, and he pressed back in, he whispered ‘oh’ against Dean’s mouth—like it wasn’t possible except here they were, and yeah, Dean kind of knew the feeling.

Which was why he didn’t go. Which was why when they broke apart he dropped their foreheads together, closed his eyes, Cas’s hair nudging the bill of Dean’s baseball cap upwards, and let Cas see. Let _everyone_ see.

“S’okay to want things, Cas,” he told his best friend, like he should have told him maybe a thousand times before. “I do.”

“Oh,” Cas murmured, again, the tiniest fluff of breath against Dean’s lips. Then, “Alright.”

This time, Cas was the one who leaned in for a kiss.

~fin~

**Author's Note:**

> This was based on this proposed prompt from vik is miss americana - https://vm.tiktok.com/WrFqyN/


End file.
